This project started in 1992 with an initial research and development lead by DESY Hamburg then Zeuthen. At the beginning of 1994, A. Köhler/DESY came to CERN and, together with the author, they improved the scripts at shell level, provided documentation, started the initial deployment. After the initial feedback at CERN, new developments of the HEPiX scripts had been undertaken and started the major deployment at CERN during winter 1994-1995. In the same time, RAL and INFN deployed the HEPiX scripts on their respective sites.
Although the scripts have been really well accepted, it became clear that solving the shell problem was not enough and 2 working-groups had been set up, UMTF-X11 at CERN and HEPiX-X11, in order to specify and then propose a first implementation.
Then the implementation and tests was completed at CERN and the HEPiX X11 were introduced in production in Novemeber 1995. They were improved periodically during the next 6 months and in June a split between the different component of the package was performed. The goal of this operation was to give more flexibility to the different actors to make it evolve.
An important rationalisation occured in the same time.
Fig.2 summarizes the history of the project. The cooperation between DESY and CERN and the feedback from INFN, RAL, Saclay and Slac is really a key-factor of success. Many people contributed to provide users, a decent defaults and system managers, easy ways to make local adaptations.
At CERN it should be noticed that the HEPiX scripts are deployed on all the WorkGroup Server (WGS) platforms and PLUS machines. Thus, CMS, ATLAS, SHITCMS, SHIFTATLAS, CERNSP, HPPLUS and also traditional UNIX services like DXCERN provide the HEPiX environment.
The integration with the other services had been successful, in particular, with SUE, ASIS and CORE.
Read deployment and integration and people and working-groups for more information.